The Near Future of Driving: Eyes Forward, but No Hands at 10 and 2 Ms. Sieradski said G. M. had tried to engineer Super Cruise to keep drivers safe — and limit opportunities to use the system improperly — by restricting how and where they could use it. The system is able to determine when the car is on a service road along the highway, or even on entry and exit ramps — locations where it requires you to steer yourself. The system determines its exact location by relying on high-precision digital maps and GPS technology, while sensors track the surrounding traffic — the way sensors do for driver aides like adaptive cruise control. So on this brisk November day, my hands-free road trip with Super Cruise offered a glimpse into that future — a world in which the grinding daily commute will transform into quiet time, and long drives can become productive hours on the road. I am tapping this into my iPhone while sitting at the wheel of a 2018 Cadillac CT6 luxury sedan, rolling along a shade under 75 miles per hour on Interstate 94 about 20 miles west of Ann Arbor, Mich. After a few seconds, the light strip turns green again, and my hands are free to go back to the iPhone. That leaves me free to sit back and type these words — and do much more that would otherwise be considered unsafe — as the mile markers zip by.
